Every Once a Critic

The following two weeks are going to be a little busier than usual since these are my final weeks of the semester, and therefore my final weeks in Japan. With that mind, I'll be keeping the blog posts for these two weeks on the simple side. This week I want to introduce people to gaming criticism.


It's strange really, but video game critics, unlike their reviewer counterparts, really took a while to come into being. It wasn't really until Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw's Zero Punctuation first appeared on Youtube in 2007, and was later swiftly picked up by the Escapist,  that interest in actually breaking down games and analyzing how effective they are at interacting with their audience gained any credibility whatsoever.

"We may need you to play Twing-Twang"
Go and look it up, it'll be worth your time.

Mind you, there had been game criticism before Zero Punctuation, in everything from articles in the somewhat elite centered Gamasutra, to other prominent figures in the video game culture like the Angry Video Game Nerd. The difference however, was that Zero Punctuation was funny and enjoyable, without going to comedic extremes (like the nerd), as well as smart and thought provoking, while also being accessible in video form (unlike the Gamasutra articles and similar things). The british accent was a big plus too.

There's more of this over at escapistmagazine.com

The problem with Zero Punctuation is that, for better or worse, it is an insiders criticism show i.e. it is filled with references that only those familiar with video game culture will understand. Non-gamer folk may probably enjoy the ridiculously fast talking, they may even laugh at some of the crude jokes, but more times than not they'll probably not get it at all. Thankfully though, Yathzee is not the only mainstream game critic available. There is also Extra Credits.

This is an early episode before the show had its proper name.

You can see the new ones over at penny-arcade

As admitted by Daniel Floyd (the show's creator) he took most of his inspiration for his videos from Zero Punctuation. This, however, isn't a problem because Extra Credits is a different side of game criticism. They tend to focus more on the gaming industry as a whole (although there is the occasional title centered episode) making them more of an ideal place to become informed about gaming culture and its struggles to become a more respectable entertainment medium. If someone came and asked me what "all the fuss with them video games is all about", I would definitely point them over to Extra Credits.

"YEAH! LEMONS!"

If they were to ask me, though, what all the fuss about video games' potential is, I would redirect them without a doubt to Egoraptor's Sequelitis. Arin Hanson is an interesting figure in the video game culture, starting out with flash parodies of famous video games (The Awesome Series), delving in some animation and Anime related videos, and now giving out comprehensive, comparative game criticism with his new show Sequelitis. The beautiful thing about this show is that, despite new episodes being scarcer than water in a desert, the analysis and production is so interesting and of so much quality you'll find yourself looking at these videos more than once.

Before finishing today's post I want to give one last shout out to another prominent, if controversial, game critic, The Game Overthinker. The man might not be the most accessible or the most consistent quality but at least he always has interesting things to say, and I see no fault in that. See you next week when I'll provide insight on something else. What, you ask? Come back next Monday and find out.